Lowestoft Railway and Bowls – Waveney Norse Council Xmas party

Was it my imagination or was the weather getting warmer? It was certainly dark and drizzly as I drove over, but not actually freezing as it had been for the last month! I made steady progress arriving at 6:30pm after an hour and a quarter. Being there first I was able to pick my parking slot and soon got the gear in. I was just setting up the mains leads when in came Dave and Jen, followed closely by Mick (the “committee man” translates to concert secretary in these parts) who arranged for the dance floor to be cleared of the tables and chairs left there from the previous event. As I resumed set up, in came Nigel perversely wearing his fleece in the increasingly mild temperature. Mind you he did take it off after a band chorus of “You won’t feel the Benefit” (reminds me of a UB40 song). After a while everything was set up OK but, as we switched on, we ran immediately into feedback problems. This was mainly due to the setting changes I had made at the previous gig to push more of Dave and Nige’s vocals through my Bose. So I reset the cross feed volumes back to 12 o’clock, but it was still feeding back a bit and it was only when I spotted that the master volume on the Rolls mixer was also up at 1 o’clock that I could get rid of it. Basically, I could do with 15 minutes balancing the reverb and Rolls mixer settings in a hall one day! The place was filling up nicely so we omitted a sound check and Mick got the disco underway at a respectable volume, until Dave asked him to turn up one of his favourite tunes! Nige and I took refuge in the quiet bar. When Dave joined us he suggested that with only 2 sets to do and some serious drinking already underway, why not start with Set 2? We agreed to do this and dip back into set 1 if we needed it. As we returned to the concert room I took advantage of Mick’s absence to turn the volume down a tad on the disco and we went to get changed in the foyer leading to the indoor bowling green. With all the dressing room banter going on we lost track of time and were 10 minutes late on stage! We finally got going and opened up with the Searchers. It was very loud and quite dark on stage but the large audience seemed to be OK with it and we got a good round of applause as we kept the beat going and announced “Do It Again”. We played pretty much by the Set 2 book after that with the notable exceptions of “Rockin Around the Xmas Tree” (much too fast again) and “Shine” which got a good reaction. The audience seemed to like the band banter and they did a bit of dancing to the faster numbers, but they really came up in force for the first slowey: “Halfway to Waveney Norse Council”. Dave led us straight into the intro and after that, Dave and Nige kept the beat going while I did the announcement. That worked very well (we should do more of that in my opinion). However, we soon got thrown out of our stride by doing “Sweet Caroline” to precede the announcement for the “buffet is ready” and then trying to do the Elvis routine while the audience’s attention was diverted by food. Anyway, Dave hammed it up very well and it went down well with those watching. It was a hard audience to read. There was a vocal minority asking for fast numbers and then not dancing, whilst the silent majority really wanted slow dances so they could do office party bum clutching (or bottom grabbing as they say in posh places). We played a mix of material to the close of the set, including a good Shadows walk with correct guitar settings and a chorus line of parking attendants and then “White Xmas”; which I wrongly started in the key of D in the dark and so we had to continue in D! But they all sang along anyway. At 10:10pm Mick pointed out we were running over time so we bravely finished with “I Believe”. My fault for misreading the clock! Then we had a long break for awards and speeches. In the break Nige and I took the Bose volumes down a notch because we both felt it was too loud on stage. Before resuming with our normal set 3 show, Dave had organised us to do a request for “Peaceful Easy Feelin”. Nige took the lead, Dave the first harmony and with me on top it went down very well with the crowd. So well that the chap who requested it came up to sing karaoke on the house mic doing “Lying Eyes” with us! After that, up comes another fellow who wanted to do an Elvis number. He didn’t know any of our Elvis repertoire so we did one he knew: “His Latest Flame”. Nige and Dave did a great job considering they hadn’t played it at all before (I had played it a few times in Revival 18 years ago!). Of course the crowd loved all this and when we opened up Set 3 proper with “500 Miles” they were very raucously singing, dancing, clapping and stamping along. As we opened up with “Amarillo” a lot of people came up to dance the party dance sequence all the way through to “All Right Now”. But they looked a bit hot and bothered after that so we did “Unchained” and filled the floor again – this time with bum clutchers. So much so that we reprised “White Xmas” (this time in C) as another slowey that they could croon and dance along with Bob, Bing and Perry (Dave, Mog and Nige) and they did just that! By this point we were into closing time, so we did a spirited finish with “Merry Xmas Everybody”, and that went down so well that Mick asked us to do another. We chose to encore with “Pretty Woman”. Dave tried to sign off at the end but the remaining audience were a bit worse for drink so they were not sure what they were clapping for I think! All in all it was a good night for the band and several people came up to say how much they had enjoyed it. We got packed and loaded up quickly and were on the road by 12:50 am. Apart from slowing to avoid police attending a crash on the road near Beccles, I had a quiet run home under clear skies with no moon. It meant that the stars were very bright and town lights were visible for miles as an eerie glow on the horizon. Also the temperature had continued to rise in a light South West wind - it was over 10 degrees as I rolled into the drive just before 2am feeling strangely awake.